Emotionomics: Leveraging Emotions for Business Success (Book Review)

On July 20, 2013

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In Emotionomics: Leveraging Emotions for Business Success, Dan Hill (Founder and President of Sensory Logic, speaker) examines the importance of emotional components in marketing, advertising and sales by presenting a compelling case for employing emotionomics matrix – a model the author developed to quantify, analyze and explain emotional responses to stimuli in the processes of designing and evaluating advertising copy and analyzing a sales process. This matrix is used as a formula for quantifying people’s emotional responses observed through facial coding (the movement of facial muscles). The technique and the science behind the facial coding are presented as a reliable measure of the strength of emotional response (both impact and appeal) in testing advertisement effectiveness.
Facial coding has been around a lot longer than verbal language. We communicate with one another continuously at subtle levels we are generally unaware of. By studying facial responses to inputs, you can find out about how the emotions are truly processing. For example, somebody may say that they like a certain ad, but emotionally they don’t trust the characters in the ad and therefore don’t trust the brand and won’t buy.
Generating an emotional response in a target market that’s important to support one’s business goal. Being on-emotion is at least as important as being on-message or on-strategy, both of which fail to engage the heart and win people over. Emotion drives reason more than reason drives emotion. Science shows that we react to inputs emotionally as quickly as we do logically. We can tell somebody how great our company is but if we don’t make them feel good about our company, we lose the battle. Visual imagery and other non-verbal forms of communication predominate.
People feel more pain from loss than pleasure from profit. The result is loss-aversion behavior, for people will take more risks to avoid losses than they will to realize gains. The example of this shows up in sales. Once the sales person generates a decent living for themselves, business owners have a difficult time getting them to increase their sales by changing or enhancing their sales strategies. Their fear of losing the comfort zone is much greater than the desire to succeed further. The Facial Action Coding System designed by psychologist Dr. Paul Ekman identifies seven core emotions: surprise, fear, anger, sadness, disgust, contempt, and happiness. Interestingly, happiness can be divided between true smiles and social smiles, the latter which may indicate deceit.
Research suggests that people tend to say they like something more than their actual feelings merit. According to some large studies done by Hill, when survey ratings were positive, people were in fact positive only 74% of the time.

To achieve success, companies must follow nature. To create a unified culture, a leader must commit rationally to being emotionally vulnerable.

Dan Hill presents a wide variety of business concepts and how these concepts apply to the workplace. Once you will start reading this book, you won’t be able to put is down, as it offers a great introduction to emotions in the business world. I encourage anyone to read it and especially business managers, as it provokes us and makes us to understand that there is a hidden truth behind people’s answers and Dan Hill has made a success by helping advertisers discern truth from appearance.